Dollar Value of Employment Cases
Clients and potential clients sometimes ask me what is their case (or potential case) worth? What little they know of its value is colored by the ubiquitous Personal Injury lawyer ads. Or, sometimes, their knowledge is influenced by what some brother-in-law knows or thinks he knows. So, some clients, a small percentage expect wealth and riches.
Employment cases are not car wreck cases. The employment discrimination statutes provide for specific types of damages. Title VII and the Texas law equivalent, Texas Commission on Human Rights Act, provide for lost pay and benefits, compensatory damages, punitive damages and costs of prosecuting the lawsuit which includes attorney's fees.
So, I am sorry, but the court cannot, even if it wanted, award you the value of the home you lost or the divorce the job loss caused. That sort of information does help show emotional suffering. But, no, there will be no dollar for dollar award regarding a lost home. I wish there were. The judge cannot award anything not allowed by statute.
Lost pay and benefits include more than may meet the eye. It includes lost pay of course. It includes all lost benefits. So, save that COBRA letter that records the dollar amount paid by the employer for your medical insuirance. I do not need to know how much you paid each month out of your paycheck for medical insurance. I need to know how much the employer paid.
Lost benefits include retirement benefits. Terminations involve different calculations than failure to promote. Lost promotions or raises can affect how much a 401K would grow. I have had a few clients who could "guesstimate" pretty well how much their retirement would have grown if they had received a particular step increase. If the client cannot make their estimate, then we may need to hire an economist to study the issue.
Lost bonuses count. Of course, the employer will claim bonuses are never guaranteed. They may even point to policies which provide bonuses are never certain and depend on financial success each fiscal year. But, if the actual practice suggests that bonuses are likely and that failure to pay a bonus may have been motivated by discriminatory animus, then we have a fact issue regarding bonuses. If we have a factual issue, then the issue will be decided by a judge or jury.
Arriving at an amount for compensatory damages is complicated. Compensatory damages describes damages intended to compensate a person for emotional suffering. How do we measure emotional suffering? The best source is actual jury verdicts. If we can point to a similar case, involving similar discriminatory practices by similar employers and employees, then we rely on such cases. But, discrimination is rarely the same across industries. Employers often are different in very critical ways. So, truly comparable jury verdicts are rare.
We also look at studies. There have been a few. Most studies show that a winning plaintiff in an employment cases gets no compensatory damages. The few who are awarded some amount are typically awarded an amount equal to or comparable to the amount of lost pay and benefits. If the discrimination victim is a Vice-President who lost $100,000 in pay and benefits, then the jury in such an instance would award $100,000 in compensatory damages. If the victim is a warehouse laborer and his lost pay and benefits is $15,000, then the jury who awards compensatory damages awards another $15,000 in emotional suffering damages.
That may not be fair. The emotional suffering between the VP and the warehouseman may be the very same level. They may both lose their homes, marriages and suffer enormously. But, as I tell my clients, in the legal business, we do not deal in "fair." We have to deal in reality. The "real world" is the mode of exchange for most lawyers and judges.
Punitive damages are very rare, according to studies. They tend to range across wide extremes.
Of course, all these amounts are subject to caps. Title VII and the the TCHR Act are capped at various levels based on number of employees. The highest cap is $300,000. So, even the largest employer in the country will never see a larger award than $300,000 in compensatory damages.
Once in a blue moon, you will see a jury award a million dollars for compensatory damages. But, that amount will be reduced by a judge to the appropriate cap level.
So, as I hear from some clients, some brother-in-law may know of an "exact same case" that resulted in a million dollars. Great, I advise the client, go hire that brother-in-law, because he knows more than I do.
